Delivering proven results for tradies with Telstra Trades Assist

By Anne Da CunhaOctober 31, 2019

When you ask any small business owner what takes up the majority of their time, more often than not they’ll say it’s paperwork. We want to help all small businesses take advantage of digitisation, and with Telstra Trades Assist, it’s a snap.

Making the complex simple

If you’re a tradie running your own business, you have to stay on top of admin to be successful. Manage invoices; schedule staff; deal with equipment and parts, all while managing customers and their expectations and trying to keep a work-life balance. It’s this grinding admin work that could be spent on what really matters. That’s why we’ve got Trades Assist to turn your juggling act into a simple straightforward routine.

Our Trades Assist app is an all-in-one business tool to be used on a compatible device, that helps you streamline your business by putting everything at your fingertips. It allows you to assign jobs according to skills and availability; quote jobs faster with material price lookups; simplify invoicing with MYOB and Xero support, and a business dashboard gives you a real-time view of your performance. Trades Assist also acts as a customer record-keeping app that records your customers’ details and even provides you the fastest travel route to their job.

We’ve partnered with Suncorp, Cube Performance; Energy Space;
Kennards Hire; Master Electricians Australia; MYOB and Xero (to name a few) to
help you connect with services and automate more of your admin tasks.

It puts you in control of your business with a smart yet
intuitive and simple app that streamlinesyour admin tasks for the best results.

Saving a year of productivity

Time is money when you’re running a business, and the
ability to save time can increase profitability at the end of the financial
year. That’s exactly what happened with O’Byrne Plumbing.

O’Byrne Plumbing is a family-owned business launched in 1992 by Mark and Neradine O’Byrne in Tasmania. The business is now managed by their son, Tristan, and daughter, Adelaide, who handles the all-important administrative tasks.

Prior to their use of Telstra Trades Assist, booking a job
was a much slower process. Adelaide would record a client’s request on paper
and write up a schedule on a whiteboard each day. This was also entered into a
paper diary for record-keeping and plumbers would visit the office each morning
to grab their paper job cards.

Once the job was completed, the paper card would be returned
with what the plumber had done recorded on it, and Adelaide would calculate the
cost to be charged before inputting it to MYOB. This process slowed down
productivity. The simple act of recording everything onto paper cards before
transposing it to the daily whiteboard would take up to two hours of their precious
business time each day.

Once they implemented Telstra Trades Assist in their business, the cost savings started stacking up. On each job, Adelaide now saves at least 20 minutes per job which has added up to over 1800 hours saved since implementing the app 18 months ago. That’s 225 work days – almost a year of business by just digitising the admin procedures!

This frees Adelaide and the rest of the business up to do more work that they simply didn’t have time for prior to implementing Telstra Trades Assist. Jobs are quoted faster, invoicing is quicker and cash flow is improving significantly.

Adelaide says she now has more time to focus on growing the business.

“Telstra Trades Assist has streamlined our tasks and created greater efficiency for our company. Instead of drowning in paperwork, we have the freedom to concentrate on other aspects that further grow and develop our business,” she told us.

Anne Da Cunha is the Small Business Executive for Telstra. She is passionate about the Success of Australian Businesses and in developing ways that Telstra can partner with them, to ensure they get all the business and technology solutions they need to thrive and be the innovators of Australia.
Anne has a diverse commercial, channel and marketing leadership career, spanning many sectors including; Travel, Retail, Education and Telecommunications. Previous to Telstra, she was the Chief Marketing Officer for Laureate Australia, which operates Torrens University Australia and a number of innovative higher education colleges. Prior to that, Anne was General Manager of Cellarmasters, Australia’s leading direct and digital wine retailer, at Woolworths Liquor. She also has over a decade of experience in roles across multiple telecommunications organisations in the UK and Europe including; Carphone Warehouse and O2 Telefonica.